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Bracket Provokes Its Own Madness for the N.C.A.A.

The bracket is the star. A road map of hypnotic, straight-line symmetry leading to the Final Four, it is revered for both its simplicity and its complex possibilities. When empty, the bracket stirs hype and imagination. When filled with 65 teams at their starting lines, it stirs even more.

Millions will watch the conversion today as the field for the N.C.A.A. Division I men's basketball tournament is revealed during an hourlong program.

Among the interested viewers, tucked emotionally between the teams and millions of eager office poolers, will be a loose army of people who see the unveiling of the bracket as the nexus of their lives, either personally or professionally, and sometimes both.

They are prognosticating bracketologists or tireless trackers of the Ratings Percentage Index. They are sellers of software that run office pools, or people who manage Internet contests that attract millions. They are people who will help fill your bracket for a fee, or who will sell you a T-shirt with the bracket on the back.

The tournament begins Tuesday and crowns a champion on April 3. Each of 31 conferences is assured of at least one bid, and speculation over the teams that make up the rest of the field, chosen by a 10-member committee, fascinates fans and fuels interest not only in the bracket, but also in what everyone now calls March Madness.

In Bristol, Conn., completed brackets -- with predicted winners of every game -- will arrive at espn.com computers from fans participating in an online contest. On the first night last year, entries came at a rate of 1,200 a minute.

In Lawrence, Kan., thousands of T-shirts will be printed with the new bracket at Prairie Graphics, the smallest of eight licensed apparel companies for the tournament.

In San Diego and in Milford, Conn., friends who run www.bracketology101.blogspot.com from opposite coasts will check their predicted tournament entrants against the field chosen by the N.C.A.A. selection committee, viewing discrepancies as public failures.

"It is our national championship day," said Chris Kulenych, one of the 25-year-old partners.

If a sporting event for fan interaction were created from scratch, it might mirror the N.C.A.A. tournament. Spanning three weekends, it is long enough for engagement, short enough for wandering minds. It involves 65 colleges of varying sizes. It attracts a demographically friendly fan base of students and alumni; untold millions swept up for the ride; and a large audience of small-time office poolers and high-stakes gamblers.

That has not changed much over the years. What is different is the volume of information and the degree of interaction, sparked by tech-savvy wonks who have combined the allure of the tournament with the power of the Internet.

Nowhere is the growth of the bracket's prestige more evident than with the proliferation of bracketology, a concept defined in Wikipedia, not Webster's.

It is no longer enough to wait for the field to be announced and fill in the bracket with predicted winners. It is now sport to spend the regular season predicting which teams will win bids to the tournament, how they will be seeded and where they will play.

Joe Lunardi is the most visible practitioner. A university spokesman and radio announcer at St. Joseph's in Philadelphia, his Bracketology page is one of the most popular at espn.com. In the logged-in world of college basketball, a tweak in his predicted bracket can elicit hundreds of e-mail messages.

Lunardi is college basketball's version of the N.F.L. draft expert Mel Kiper Jr., who turned a hobby into a narrowly focused job as a knowledgeable, sometimes bombastic analyst.

"I'm better-looking than Mel, and my hair moves a little more than Mel's, but the analogy is a fair one," Lunardi said. "We took something that people cared about in a nonpublic way and made it public."

Some want to emulate Lunardi. Some want to counter him.

"I kind of got tired of Joe Lunardi's shtick and thought I would give it a try," said David Mihm, 23, of Oakland, Calif.

Mihm's full-time job is marketing for a golf-ball logo company. Meanwhile, his www.bracketography.com site has averaged 3,500 visitors a day since March 1.

Bracket projections are a logical extension of rankings. Like a handful of others, Ken Pomeroy, a 32-year-old meteorologist in Cheyenne, Wyo., devised his computer ratings years ago.

Now his www.kenpom.com, is one of several sites to provide continual updates of the R.P.I., a complex measure used to select tournament teams that involves won-lost records and strength of schedule. Everything on Pomeroy's site is free.

Pomeroy is a fan who has only pondered ways to make a profit. Jerry Palm is one of the few who has done so.

Palm became a full-time sports guru after he was laid off four years ago from his job as a computer programmer. Married with four children and living in a Chicago suburb, Palm, 42, attracts thousands of daily visitors to his ratings sites, www.collegerpi.com and www.collegebcs.com (for the Bowl Championship Series in football). About 1,500 subscribers pay to unearth much of his data and analysis.

"It's great for me," Palm said. "Who knows how long it will last?"

There is no sign of slowing; fans seek validation for their teams, one Web site at a time.

"One week into the basketball season, half the teams haven't played yet, and I've got people e-mailing me saying: 'Put the R.P.I. up. I want to see where we're at,' " said Warren Nolan, 36, of Oklahoma City, who has a master's in applied mathematics, works for a defense contractor and provides statistics on www.warrennolan.com. It averages about 2,000 visitors a day.

Everything changes when the field is announced. No longer do people care about possible matchups; they want help picking winners.

The popular www.teamrankings.com is prepared for the transition. The site's founder, Mike Greenfield, a 28-year-old Stanford graduate, created BracketBrains, an interactive tool that allows users to match any two opponents and project the winner. For $4.95, $16.95 or $39.95, subscribers to Greenfield's site get varying degrees of computer analysis.

The office-pool market is big, and it is growing. At www.cbs.sportsline.com, three free bracket contests contribute up to 15 percent of the site's total page views in March, said Steve Snyder, the site's general manager.

At espn.com, 1.5 million players completed 3 million brackets for its Tournament Challenge last year, 25 percent more than in 2004. John Kosner, senior vice president and general manager for ESPN new media, said he had approved the purchase of "more machines to handle the load."

"It's one of those features that's high in engagement," said David Katz, head of sports and entertainment for Yahoo. "People come in frequently and they spend a lot of time there."

There seems to be no limit to the growth possibilities surrounding college basketball. Like the bracket itself, when one blank is filled, another possibility is presented.

Mike Scullin, a 19-year-old sophomore at St. Joseph's, has found one. His year-old site, tcaa.puretecmo.com/nit06.html, predicts the field and the seedings for the National Invitation Tournament, the second-tier basketball competition. The home page calls it NIT-ology.